You're Supposed To Write This

He was looking for a friend. I was looking for silence. My eyes stayed low, focused on my hollowing bag of plantain chips. I had gotten the last pack on the plane and the snack trolley had only gone six rows back. Admittedly, they weren't that interesting to study as they dwindled, those salty slivers I knew I shouldn't be indulging in, but I felt his eyes strong on me, neck craned to the left from his windowless window seat in my direction. But I refused to meet his eyes. Doing so would be a non-verbal contract of on-and-off conversation for the better part of three hours and forty minutes. He already told me about some of his whereabouts. "You going to Guyana?" The vessel was packed to the brim with fussy, impatient, slow-bustling, heavy-tongued and sharp-eyed travelers with Jamaican and Guyanese passports, or those who eventually traded them in for matte, navy blue USA booklets. From the look of me, I would be exiting the plane in Kingston, just like from the look

I keep seeing the ghosts of things I've wanted but could never have. I think I have a knack for preparing people for their next best things. Or, at least it always feels that way. And since this is clearly the era of seeing, remembering--frequently, at that--even when you don't want to, I suffer. Memories real and hypothetical wring at my insides. I saw a Him I wanted once in the train station today. He still looked like the gentleman that I knew him to be. Button down shirt, slim jeans, dress boots. Tall and lanky with the swagger of a Harlem trumpeter. A quirky tangle of locks that had nearly doubled in length since we were last in each other's midst. Engaged. Invisibly, of course. You can't tell on the outside--the She was not there--but I know. Thanks to the joy and unwanted charity of social media, and that we remained "friends" on one the most visual platforms of our generation, I see constant proof that the flame I'd hoped for three or so years ag

my life doesn't feel like my own. it's a funny thing to wake up in the morning, feel around in the darkness with my fingertips, trying to find orientation from the safety of my bed, walk over to the mirror, flick on the lights and see nothing. not literally of course. there i stand, looking back at myself, wiping the crust from my eye corners and staring down a shell. a big ball of empty housed by a brown body prepped for a daily routine of busywork, and a wandering mind, brimming with problems both real and imagined, blocking a purpose.   what am i doing? why am i doing this? wordlessly, the refrain haunts me as i fight morning fatigue, standing soapy under running warm water, fixing eggs and tea, slipping on one shoe then the other, setting foot outside, already looking forward to when that same foot will step back inside the house at the end of the day, and my bed's call will be answered. repeat. i am 28. i am 28 and lost. i am 28 and lost and living like I have to be t